Uyghur 'Imams' most vulnerable to persecution in China, claim victims

Uyghur Hjelp, a Norway-based Uighur advocacy and aid organization, told Voice of America that Chinese authorities since 2016 have detained at least 518 key Uighur religious figures and imams.

The organization told VOA it has found some of the imams, who were previously trained and employed by Beijing, are now sentenced with long prison terms while a few of them have lost their lives in internment camps.

One of the detained imams, Abdurkerim Memet, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2017, according to his daughter, Hajihenim Abdukerim in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Abdukerim told VOA that Chinese authorities were hiding the whereabouts of her father for years until recently when a local contact in Xinjiang told her of his imprisonment.  

The 61-year-old, who was employed by the Chinese government, was later detained.

His family negated Chinese government accusation that he was spreading extremism among the Uyghurs.

“My father is a peaceful and law-abiding religious figure,” said Abdukerim, adding that her father was salaried by the Chinese government until late 2016 when the newly appointed Communist party chief, Chen Quanguo, began to further enforce Beijing’s rule over Xinjiang where, according to the U.N. estimates, over a million Muslims could be held in internment camps.

“I had never imagined him being imprisoned for serving the community. In these years, I have been only hoping to hear from him again,” she told VOA.

Trump passes law to punish Chinese crackdown on Uyghur Muslims:

Cornered worldwide over the Covid-19 fiasco, China is now fuming after yet another setback as the United States passed a legislation to punish the Chinese crackdown on Uyghur Muslims, media reports said.

US President Donald Trump has signed a new bill which will allow his country to impose sanctions on Chinese officials who are involved in detaining more than one million Uighurs and members of Muslims minority in the Chinese autonomous territory of Xinjiang.

The law represents a broad bipartisan commitment by the U.S. government to address one of the worst ongoing human rights crises in the world.

In her speech supporting House approval on May 27, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) said, “Beijing's barbarous actions targeting the Uyghur people are an outrage to the collective conscience of the world.”

Applauding the bill’s passage, Senator Marco Rubio (R) stated “[f]or far too long, the Chinese Communist Party has tried to systematically wipe out the ethnic and cultural identities of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. It’s long overdue to hold the perpetrators accountable.”

The US-based Uyghur Human Rights Project are celebrating the development even as China fumes.

“Uyghurs around the world are celebrating,” said Omer Kanat, UHRP  Executive Director.

“It's the kind of news we have been waiting for, more than three years into the Uyghur crisis. But the United States cannot be the sole nation acting to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes. Uyghurs call on countries around the world to work together against ethno-religious persecution, profiling and cultural genocide,” Kanat said.

According to The New York Times, the Chinese rebuke came after China's top diplomat held a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has called Beijing's action as "the stain of the century."

Trump passed The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 overwhelmingly both in the House and Senate.

The new law allows Trump to identify Chinese officials or any other individuals who are responsible for torturing the Uighurs and submit a report within 180 days.

Image Credit: https://www.saveuighur.org